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August 22, 2011, 6:14 am UTC

If we heat it up at 1000 degree Celsius, SEO boils down to form thick dough of two things: high-quality relevant content and high-quality inbound links, or backlinks, as it is commonly known in SEO parlance.

As not all sentences are created equal, all backlinks cannot stand shoulder-to-shoulder with every other backlink. Some of them are of high-value, while, others are of low value and are untouchable. They should not be played with. One should not waste one’s time with these links. This brings us to an age-old question, what constitute high quality backlinks?

Four traits of high-quality backlinks

Any backlink that has the following four characteristics should be considered of high-quality, and one that does not have these features should not be included in the plan.

Authority websites

If BBC or CNN or Microsoft or Harvard or Oxford or Wikipedia or Delhi University or Government of India links back to your page then naturally your ego will get a kick, and you will start feeling worthy of attention. Search engine knows that longing of yours and give you the desired attention.

In fact, search engines know that authority sites like those listed above do not link back to anyone just like that, so they give respect to such links.

It has a high PageRank

If you want to rank in Google then make sure the backlinks that you get are from websites which has high PageRank or PR if you may. The higher the PR is of the website the better it is for the overall health of the backlink profile of your website.

From within the page with relevant content

Why a gambling website will link to a website that talks about foods in Delhi? This doesn’t make sense to me, and neither does it to Google and other search engines. They know that such links are forced, and does not add any value to the readers, so they do not pay homage to the recipient of such links.

You should always ascertain that the backlinks you get are from pages which are relevant to your niche, and are from inside the content, and not from footer or sidebars only. These kinds of links can also be included, but your backlink profile should not have only such links.

Links are “Do follow”

You must be puzzled about this term “do follow”. Well, if you do not know, let me tell you that this term does not mean anything because there is no such term as “do follow”, at least not in website programming (HTML and CSS) or SEO.

In fact, “do follow” is an absence of “no follow” attribute in a link.

A “no follow” attribute when attached to a link tells search engines that the webmaster does not want them to follow that link because of which a search engine will not give your webpage any credit for a “no follow” link. No matter how many such links you get.

Having some “no follow” links in the backlink profile of your website is required to make the profile look natural, but do not waste too much time creating such links.

Conclusion

When you are building links to your website, make sure you check each and every sources for above traits. Along with that make sure you have your keyword in the anchor text of those links. It will keep you in good books of all search engines, provided you have high-quality relevant content on your website.